The Christian Institute: The Scottish Government has suggested it will categorise Roman Catholic postcard responses differently to other individual responses in its consultation on redefining marriage.

The Christian Institute: Australian MPs in the governing party will be free to vote according to their “values and beliefs” on the issue of redefining marriage, Prime Minister Julia Gillard has confirmed.

CSMonitor.com: Queen Elizabeth II attended a ceremony at London’s Westminster Abbey Wednesday to mark the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible, often considered the most influential book ever printed in the English language.

New Statesman: If you want to understand how half the countries that still criminalise homosexuality came to do so, look no further than the British Empire. The list of 84 jurisdictions across the world, compiled by the newly formed Human Dignity Trust (HDT), includes 42 Commonwealth countries, or 80 per cent of the Commonwealth community.

AlbertMohler.com: The bitter lesson of Mississippi’s defeat of the human personhood amendment is this: When it comes to moral reasoning concerning the unborn child, far too many just adopt Harry Blackmun’s moral framework and want to tweak it. Many in the pro-life movement want to shift his lines of moral judgment, but not to repudiate his deadly logic. We may think we are pro-life, but if we do not affirm the personhood of every human being at every point of development, from fertilization onward, we are not really so pro-life as we think. Or, in other words, we’re all Harry Blackmun now.

“As we gather in our communities and in our homes, around the table or near the hearth, we give thanks to each other and to God for the many kindnesses and comforts that grace our lives. Let us pause to recount the simple gifts that sustain us, and resolve to pay them forward in the year to come.”

The Washington Post (embeds Ron Paul video ad): Texas Rep. Ron Paul, long dismissed by the GOP establishment as a fringe candidate, has broadened his electoral appeal and emerged as a major player in the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses, according to several recent polls and conversations with a handful of longtime Hawkeye political operatives.

ADF Attorney Michael Norton at Townhall: In a growing number of states around the country, legislators and other office holders are doing their best to stem the flow of taxpayer monies into Planned Parenthood’s coffers. And as they do this, it’s understood that they’re one judge away from having their legislation crippled or thrown out, and the financial lifeline to Planned Parenthood reopened.

Total Catholic: Health Secretary Andrew Lansley is facing mounting criticism from MPs and peers over plans to force every local authority in the country to commission abortion services as part of swingeing reforms of the NHS.

Larissa Faw at Forbes: Young professional women may not relate to the financial struggles their Millennial peers are protesting against during the Occupy New York movement. After all, these ambitious go-getters are working as doctors, lawyers, engineers, and advertising executives, blessed with great salaries, health benefits, and paid vacation.

St. Cloud Times: Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton on Tuesday ordered Minnesota’s home-based child care providers to vote on whether to form a union, putting him on a union-rights collision course with Republican lawmakers who immediately vowed to sue in order to prevent the vote.

Bill Saunders and Mary Novick at LifeNews.com: The fight for legal recognition and protection of the unborn child is not fatally diminished by the recent rejection of the Mississippi personhood initiative. In fact, there have been multiple victories for the recognition of the unborn child as a person under the law across the country this year, and there is a winning strategy in place to continue setting legal precedent for personhood.

San Francisco Chronicle: Memories of the World War II internment of Japanese Americans – with the Supreme Court’s approval – should remind Americans of the dangers of unchecked presidential power in wartime, Justice Stephen Breyer told a San Francisco law school audience Wednesday.

“In a postelection challenge to a voter-approved initiative measure, the official proponents of the initiative are authorized under California law to appear and assert the state’s interest in the initiative’s validity and to appeal a judgment invalidating the measure when the public officials who ordinarily defend the measure or appeal such a judgment decline to do so.”

Fox News: A South Carolina cancer center that gave Santa Claus the boot has reversed its decision, but said they will ban any Christmas decorations that are religious in nature – including the Nativity.

News from The Associated Press: Russia’s top gay rights activist on Thursday condemned a bill passed in the country’s second largest city that prohibits “propaganda of homosexuality” to minors, warning it could be used to ban gay protest rallies.

LifeNews.com: Thousands of pro-life advocates on Monday night were introduced to the latest Planned Parenthood official to quit working for the abortion business and become a pro-life advocate. Sue Thayer, former Planned Parenthood manager from Storm Lake, Iowa, shared her conversion . . .

News from The Associated Press: Attackers threw rocks and broken glass at a march by Coptic Christians in Cairo Thursday, injuring 10, in the latest outbreak of sectarian violence less than two weeks before the start of parliamentary elections.

Mark Walsh at the School Law Blog, Education Week: A prominent federal appeals court judge said in a recent speech that courts should defer more to school administrators, and that students today are “spoiled and coddled” and should “learn to roll with the punches” and not be hypersensitive about political or religious messages in schools they might find offensive.

Idaho Press-Tribune: But the Arizona-based Alliance Defense Fund claims the school district was pressured by gay rights activists who don’t want parents to know if their kids are joining a club that promotes equal rights for homosexuals, bisexuals and transgender people. The Alliance Defense Fund has also sued the Idaho Public Charter School Commission on behalf of the now-defunct Idaho Classical Academy charter school in Nampa in an attempt to allow the school to use religious texts in the classroom.

News from The Associated Press: A frontrunner to be Tunisia’s next prime minister has caused a political storm by referring to the country’s future as a “Caliphate,” a historic form of Islamic government.

Rasmussen Reports: As the Supreme Court considers the constitutionality of the health care law, American voters overwhelming reject the notion that the federal government has the authority to force anyone to buy health insurance.

Christian Post: Attorney Jeffrey Shafer from The Alliance Defense Fund, who is representing the pro-life organization, said that First Amendment rights were at stake here, and he was confident that the ruling would stand and allow even more states to adopt the plates.

State Senator Jim Shockley and Margaret Dor at the Montana Lawyer at p. 8 (Nov. 2011): Attorneys Greg Jackson and Matt Bowman provide this analysis: If the idea of suicide itself is suggested to the patient first by the doctor or even by the family, instead of being on the patient’s sole initiative, the situation exceeds “aid in dying” as conceived by the Court. If a particular suicide decision process is anything but “private, civil, and compassionate,” . . . , the Court’s decision wouldn’t guarantee a consent defense. If the patient is less than “conscious,” is unable to “vocalize” his decision, or gets help because he is unable to “self-administer,” or the drug fails and someone helps complete the killing, Baxter would not apply. No doctor can prevent these human contingencies from occurring in a given case . . . in order to make sure that he can later use the consent defense if he is charged with murder. (Analysis of Implications of the Baxter Case on Potential Criminal Liability, Spring 2010, at www.montanansagainstassistedsuicide.org/p/baxter-case-analysis.html)

Daniel Henninger at WSJ.com: The decision by the Obama administration to “delay” building the Keystone XL pipeline is a watershed moment in American politics. The implication of a policy choice rarely gets more stark than this. Put simply: Why should any blue-collar worker who isn’t hooked for life to a public budget vote for Barack Obama next year?

LifeNews.com: An investigation by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), into the Obama Administration’s use of $18 million in taxpayer funds to provide funding for a group pushing legalized abortion in Kenya finds the administration broke the law.

Digital Trends: Google, eBAy, AOL, Facebook, Yahoo, Zynga, LinkedIn, Mozilla and Twitter — have placed a full-page ad in today’s New York Times as part of their efforts to fight back against the “Stop Online Piracy Act” (SOPA) and the “PROTECT IP Act.”

The Hill: Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Fla.) on Wednesday night said Republican governors and legislatures are purposefully pressing for the enactment of voter identification laws in order to suppress Democratic voter turnout in the 2012 election.